Great news - BUILDING UP made our goal! Final tally: you and your fellow circus lovers helped us raise $25,800!

THANK YOU, from the bottom of our hearts, for all your support.

Over the past few years, we've been able to make major enhancements in every space in our building. For example - a bigger stage, an aerial truss, and new mats in the Theater. An expansion and new flooring in both the Green Room and Trapeze Room. A new flying trapeze net and even more needed equipment across all our departments. All of this has made training and performing at Circus Center even better, and it was all thanks to support from you, our community.

And now, because of BUILDING UP, just look at what you've made possible:

New floor mats for the Main Gym

Permanent performance lighting to make gym shows easier and cheaper

Restuffed and repaired crash pads

Vital roof repairs to protect our building this winter

New flooring for the Lobby

But that's not all. By supporting BUILDING UP and these vital improvements, you helped us take the last big step we needed to create a regular community event, $5 Friday, where anyone can come and experience the unique joys of circus arts in this special place. Thank you for being a part of BUILDING UP, and helping us take care of our home and build our community.

We are so proud to announce that Clown Conservatory, Circus Center's unique multidisciplinary training program for aspiring professional clowns, has been awarded a $10,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts!

This grant represents recognition at the very highest level of this program that is setting the standard for New American Clowning. Under Director Sara Moore's brilliant leadership, Clown Conservatory is maintaining its 17-year tradition of rigorous, comprehensive instruction and preparation for the aspiring professional clown. At the same time, Sara and her top-notch faculty are constantly innovating, pushing the art of clowning forward into new media and a new era.

I could not be prouder of Sara and her team. Frankly, I think she’s a genius.

The future of funny is right here. Want to be part of it? It's not too late to apply to join the class of 2017-18. Click here for all the details.

This Friday, June 16, try something new and get a peek at what $5 Fridays will look like in the fall! All are invited - friends and family welcome.

Experience all kinds of circus activities at a fun family-friendly event: a $5 swing on San Francisco's only permanent flying trapeze, juggling, diabolo, plate spinning, and more, and a flying trapeze show by the Circus Center Flyers!

All proceeds from this event will support BUILDING UP and our vital second goal: making roof repairs to keep you, our students, equipment, and future $5 Friday attendees safe and dry during the next rainy season. Read more about our progress and goals for BUILDING UP and $5 Friday here.

BUILDING UP is currently at $20,797 - that's beaten our first goal, and over 58% of the way to our roof repairs! If you can, please consider helping us raise the remaining $4,202 we need by making a gift to BUILDING UP today. Thank you, and see you this Friday!

YOU'VE HELPED US RAISE $17,904 FOR BUILDING UPWell on Our Way to Phase 2: Fixing That Leaky Roof

Great BUILDING UP news: Last Saturday, your donations helped us meet the full $7,500 matching challenge, and then some!

We've raised a total of $17,904 together so far - that's 51% of our overall goal of $35,000!

THANK YOU to all the $5 Friday Founders so far. You've helped us meet our match and pass our first goal of $15,000. Thank you for making it possible for Circus Center to improve our students' everyday training and performing experience with new mats and crash pads, and take our ability to produce circus shows in the gym to the next level with permanent show lights.

Moreover, your generosity means we have an almost $3,000 head start on our next goal: $10,000 for ROOF REPAIRS.

Two years ago, we got a grant from the City that funded a first round of vital roof fixes, but the heavy rain last winter showed us that more repairs are needed. Our building is almost 90 years old, and we need to address significant leaks in the men's bathroom, near the trampoline, in the bleachers, and by the theater door into the alley.

It's hard to imagine now with summer on the way, but come winter, the storms are going to come back, and we need to make those repairs while the sun is still out. There's no way around it: being able to make targeted roof repairs now is key to keeping our building safe this winter.

We can't have people in a building that leaks. Not students training, not performers, $5 Friday attendees, or our show audiences. It's bad for you, our equipment, and your Circus Center experience. We need to take care of our building. It takes care of us every day.

Let's stay safe and dry this winter. Thanks to your generosity over the weekend, we're already almost 30% to our $10,000 goal for these roof repairs. Help us raise the $7,098 we need to fix those leaks now with a gift today.

Last Saturday, we launched BUILDING UP, a campaign to raise $35,000 to start $5 Friday, a new, regular open house-style community circus event series. This campaign will help us take care of our building, improve our students' everyday training and performing experience, and create fun, low-cost opportunities for our broader community to discover the joys of circus arts. Please join our campaign - and when you give now through 5/20, your donation will be matched 1:1 up to $7,500!

What's this campaign about?

The full details about $5 Friday and our campaign goals are detailed here, but suffice to say: we're going to make needed building fixes and equipment purchases to create a regular series of fun, low-barrier events where our greater community can try a variety of circus arts easily - and see our students perform (especially on San Francisco's only flying trapeze)!

We have three major funding goals, including roof repairs and revamping the lobby, but we're very excited about the first one:

$15,000 to invest in the Main Gym as a training and performance space by replacing the floor mats, re-stuffing the crash pads, and installing permanent show lighting.

These upgrades will improve everyday training and make our $5 Friday performances (and other shows) both easier to produce and higher quality for YOU.

So please, give to support BUILDING UP: together we can take care of our home, build a stronger circus arts community, and create opportunities for a new generation to experience the joys of circus arts. Plus, there's some fun donor swag.

Please join our campaign today. Thank you!

Curious about how the New Net & Equipment campaign and SHOW LOVE impacted Circus Center? Short answer: tremendously!

Also, we are making two temporary adjustments to our policies to make sure that you are able to get the value you expect from training at Circus Center.

Expiration Dates: You want to be able to book your spot in your favorite class all the way through the summer, right? But single drop-ins ordinarily expire after one month, and 5-Packs after three months, which wouldn’t get you all the way to September 3. So starting today, all single drop-ins and 5-Packs expire either on September 4 or their original expiration date, whichever is longer.

Unused Packs Credited Toward Fall Session Enrollment: Let’s say you buy a couple of 10-Packs, use most of them over the summer, but come fall, you want to go back to full session enrollment. You don’t want those leftover drop-in credits to go to waste. So one time only, in advance of the fall session enrollment period, you can request the value of any unused credits be applied toward the cost of fall session enrollment.

Finally, here is the Summer 2017 Schedule! You can use this to help you figure out your purchases. Open registration will begin at 10:00 am on Tuesday, May 9. No need to call or email us to register – you can manage everything online through Circus Center’s MindBody platform.

Our instructors have a busy summer planned! Some will be representing Circus Center at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in DC in July, others will be attending the National Youth Circus festival in New Jersey, and others have gigs, trips and more planned.

With all of their plans (and yours too!), we have opted to make all summer adult recreation classes drop-in only. Session enrollment will return as an option in the fall, but for the Summer 2017 session (June 5-Sept 3) all classes are drop-in enrollment and can be paid for with class packs or single credits.

Summer session will open for drop in enrollment at 10am on Tues May 9. The fastest way to enroll will be via your own MindBody account. Make sure that you have valid payment information and any necessary pre-reqs on your account in advance

Session enrollment typically offers our best pricing, but all class packs will be on sale starting May 5 so that you can continue to train within your budget. We WILL return to session enrollment for the fall and there will be NO extensions to class pack expiration dates, so purchase wisely!

Please note that if classes are full, get on the waitlist and don't be discouraged! The waitlist will be significantly more active over the summer since everyone can take advantage of the 24-hour cancellation policy.

We hope that this change gives you the chance to try a new instructor, get into a class that has previously been filled with session-enrolled students, and take a week or two off from training to enjoy your summer without losing class credits.

Last winter, we ran the SHOW LOVE fundraiser to support our community production fund. The costs of putting on community shows, like the Winter and Spring Showcases, are not covered by class tuition or by ticket sales. Your contributions helped us raise over $17,000 to produce at least 5 original circus shows in 2017, starring our talented community: professional-track youth, Clown Conservatory trainees, and advanced adult students. Sharing the magic of live circus, and creating valuable opportunities for our talented community to perform and share their art is a vital part of our mission, and you’ve made a big impact. Thank you!

Your donations have enabled Circus Center to make very specific and strategic purchases that affect everyone who performs in or attends a community production here. This is what we’ve accomplished so far:

Show Love Total Raised: $17,409

$3,200 - An amazing new light board, the ETC Colorsource 40 AV. This is an incredible upgrade that will produce beautiful, easy to use, and professional lighting for all of Circus Center’s community shows. See it in action at SFYC’s show Circus Fracas!

$1,575 - New speakers for Theater, which so far have been used by Clown Conservatory’s show The Supers and Circus Fracas - and all other theater shows going forward.

$1,935 - Lighting equipment, fogger and 3 microphones. Now the majority of our show lighting can run on normal extension cords, saving a lot of money on cabling, and we have four microphones for our performers, instead of one, for all of our shows.

$5,000 - Part of the Technical Director’s salary. A huge and important step for our organization, SHOW LOVE has helped us hire a Technical Director (hi Hector!), to help take the quality and professionalism of our productions to the next level, and keep you looking and sounding beautiful onstage.

Total so far: $12,210

Total remaining for future community shows: $5,199

Thank you for your support, and see you at the shows! Don’t miss Circus Fracas, April 29-May 13.

Here are some more words on why Circus Center runs fundraising campaigns like the New Net & Equipment Campaign and Show Love.

WHY RAISE MONEY?

Circus Center’s mission is to spread the joy of circus through performance, training, and community outreach. Our total budget for this fiscal year (2017) is over $1.4 million dollars. That includes instructors, administration, and staff for the dozens of classes a week we offer, professional-track and recreational youth programs, the professional training program Clown Conservatory, a production season with 12+ shows a year, our adaptive circus outreach program, and maintenance and repair costs for our building and equipment.

Most of the revenue to cover these costs – about 85%, in fact – comes from tuition for classes, group events, and summer camps. So why bother raising money at all? The basic answer is, we run fundraising campaigns so we can better serve our community and pursue our mission. More specifically, we raise funds to make major investments in our operation, and in order to do the things that make us more than another gym, but a non-profit center for the circus arts.

When it comes to investments, we look at two kinds: new and deferred. If we hadn’t run the New Net and Equipment campaign, we still would have replaced the flying trapeze net. After all, it was time for it to be replaced. But without your support, we might not have been able to do everything else for months, maybe years, while we saved up: upgrade all the toilets, or purchase new stilts, or replace the lights in the lobby, or make other vital purchases and repairs. What’s more, our facility is almost 100 years old, and has had many of its maintenance and repair needs deferred over the years. Your phenomenal outpouring of support from the New Net & Equipment Campaign gave us the freedom and flexibility to begin to catch up on 20 years of much-needed repairs, purchase more equipment, and fix more things, faster, to give you a better circus training experience.

Other fundraising efforts, like SHOW LOVE and our recent major donor work, enable us to do important things that don’t cover their own costs, like community productions, outreach programs, and more. In this way, we’re much like any other non-profit.

With your donations, partnership, and advocacy, we can bring the same professional quality shows, training, and outreach to the community we have loved and served for over 30 years. Thank you for your support, past and present, and for being part of the Circus Center family.

Last spring, we ran the New Net and Equipment Campaign, which started out as a $10,000 fundraiser to replace, install, and maintain our flying trapeze net. Thanks to a tremendous outpouring of support from you, our community, we ended up raising almost $27,000 – $17,000 over our original goal! – to support your equipment needs and the maintenance of our historic building. Here’s the final breakdown of what your donations to the New Net and Equipment Campaign have accomplished.

Of the $4,016 remaining at the end of our last update, we have been able to cover the follow expenses:

$1000 - Trapeze maintenance since January

$600 - New rope, rope covers, carabiners, swivels, and plates for Rope classes, purchased in March

$270 - Rescue 8s (rigging equipment) for tissus, purchased in March

$156 - Swivels for tissus, single point trapezes and other apparatuses, ordered in April

$900 - New tissus, ordered in April

$500 - Replacement ropes for trapezes, ordering in May

$590 - Order of new practice juggling balls, ordering in May

Total = $4,016

When you think about what last spring’s campaign did for Circus Center, it’s pretty amazing: a new flying net with maintenance for years; new mats in the theater and upstairs studio; new toilets in both restrooms; 13 pairs of custom-built stilts; and so much more. The New Net and Equipment Campaign made a huge impact on for Circus Center and everyone who trains here. Thank you for your support - look at the difference it made!

In part 2 of this post, see an update on last winter’s campaign, SHOW LOVE.

PS: Did you give $100 or more to the New Net campaign? Have you picked up your piece of the old net? If not (or you’re not sure) you still can! Just email Sarah - sarah@circuscenter.org or ask at the Front Desk next time you’re in.

This spring, Circus Center will produce a showcase featuring performances by our adult students. The showcase will be presented on Saturday, May 20 at 7:30 pm.

Like last year's LIFTOFF, the showcase will be informal, but nicely produced: the space will have a full lighting and sound set-up, and performers are asked to put some effort into your costumes and makeup. A member of the Circus Center staff will serve as Emcee. We will design and print flyers, postcards, and programs, and we will do our usual promotional activities online and elsewhere. it will be $10/person (16 & Under = Pay-What-You-Can), and we will take reservations in advance via Brown Paper Tickets.

Flying trapeze students will work with Mike Greenberg and the other flying instructors to put together the flying portion of the show. We will take 6-8 additional acts. Other students who are interested in performing in one of these slots should fill out this form (one form per act, not per performer). Our goal is to produce a well-balanced show (not too many performers on any single apparatus) with students who are ready to perform (based on what your Circus Center teachers tell us). So fill out this form as soon as possible, and no later than April 17May 1.

Relevant dates and times for performers:

May 1: Performers must either submit a video of their act IN COSTUME or arrange a time to show it to Barry. Acts deemed unready for public performance at this time may be cut from the show.